One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it delivers measurable results. To run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to monitor and understand email statistics such as Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Back rate, etc. Understanding these metrics will allow you to improve your email marketing campaigns and achieve better results.

Basic Email Metrics you can evaluate in each email campaign:

Open Rate - that is the total number of emails opened (when the email has been sent in HTML format).

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) - calculated as the number of unique clicks on links in the email. It basically means how many people interacted with your email.

Bounce Rate - represents the number of emails that were not delivered and 'bounced back'. There are several reasons why email bounces such as the email address is no longer valid, it was misspelled when entered, a server filtered the email out, or the recipient’s mailbox was full.

If you’ve ever created and executed a promotional campaign and weeks later were still not able to know the resultant effectiveness, you’re not alone. Direct Response Email Marketing makes it easy -- and fast -- to see just how well customers respond to your campaigns.

What metrics you should focus on?

Well, this really depends on your campaign's objectives. Knowing how many people open the email is an important indicator. However, to get a better picture of the campaign's performance, the open rate should be analyzed in combination with other metrics such as click through rate (CTR) and click-to-action rate (conversion rate).

Why is that? Because CTR and conversion rates are able to tell you how many recipients took an action you wanted them to take, such as purchased your product, signed up to your newsletter, downloaded the whitepaper, etc. Whereas, the open rate will only tell you how many people opened your email. So, to measure the effectiveness of your message, you need to go beyond the open rate down to the action level.

Today’s readers are busy. It takes 10 seconds or less for most people to decide whether to read your message or delete it. So construct your message carefully and monitor your email statistics to find out what works best for your business and market.